108233-sooo-server-merges-server-transfers
Content ---- ---- ---- Yea always better to be quiet and let people stop playing than to try to keep them around. | |} ---- ---- At risk of stating the obvious, none of the people who are already complaining about how empty their servers are will still be here 18 months from now if they're stuck in those same servers. So if that's the plan, then there's a bunch of people that the game could still keep paying $15/month that they're going to lose instead. That seems like a very poor business plan, even if a small fraction of them will pay a one-time transfer fee of $20 rather than leave now. And no doubt there's a division of labor here between Carbine and NCSoft, but I presume that NCSoft has people who ARE both informed and authorized to speak to this point. It would be nice to get some kind of update on whether anything is even being planned. I understand the desire to limit the number of people moving from one populated server to another, so I do understand having server transfer fees. But it also seems to me that once a server drops below a certain population level it's no longer really viable to play there. Free transfers to another server at that point seem like a good way to keep customers instead of losing them. | |} ---- That would be great, but this thread isn't about bringing new people in. It's about not losing ones that we already have, who actually seem to want to stay but have watched all the rest of their servers drain out and now have put a bunch of time and attention into a character who is now on a dead server. | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- I'm inclined to agree that at least part of this is just the natural cycle of recent MMOs. Tons of people flood in to see the new stuff, then many of them rush back out a month or two later to go back to their prior MMO or on to something new. SWTOR's population spike and then decline was pretty breathtaking to watch, and I lost contact with several good players when they packed up and left rather than stay in an empty server. I would just like to see some ideas bounced around for how WS can retain paying customers that it already has, rather than lose them in the hopes that they'll shell out $20/character for a transfer or reroll and start over. My experiences from SWTOR suggest to me that far more of them would rather leave than begin again or shell out even more than the game + sub that they're already paying just to continue to have a viable experience. | |} ---- So something between now and the end of the "timeline" where we see server merges or mega server. If I was running the show I would try to make the paid transfer more enticing for example paid faction change, PvE to PvP servers opened, reduced cost account wide transfer ($30 maybe), and certain servers will give a new arrival transfer buff like increased XP/Currency/Rep for X amount of time. I would also grab an idea from WoW w/the Recruit a Friend program, help bring back new players and ones that left. Maybe incorporate the credd system somehow in this too, more reasons to buy credd, and allow players to purchase some of these services that can't pay or don't want to pay w/RL money. Let the chips fall and revenue come in. | |} ----